Frank Pietronigro

Frank Pietronigro (1954 )
has worked as an artist since 1968.
One of my life’s’ dreams was accomplished, in 1998, when I became the first American artist to create zero-gravity “drift paintings” where my body floated within a three-dimensional painting that I created in zero gravity aboard NASA’s KC135 turbojet that few parabolic arcs.
It felt amazing to float in the middle of the air surrounded by floating acrylic paint; but, most important I felt elated knowing that an important work of art was actualized as I did liberate the painting from the canvas support and structure by projecting it into the zero gravity space while using pastry bags, an idea I first wrote about in my notebooks in 1974.
Such work is also complimented by my joy for painting, photography and the creation of public art projects. As a contemporary fine artist my work considers levitation, bio-morphic form and a warm glowing light that evokes the mystical unseen world of interior spaces. My large and small scale colorful works are offered to collectors as oil and acrylic paintings, pigment prints on canvas and works on paper.
Created in the spirit of pluralism, I execute my work and express my creativity using many various media and styles. I rebound between painting and digital media, between the tangible and the illusive, between matter and energy, and between transparency and opacity in support of heterogeneity.
I have served San Francisco’s LGBTQ and arts communities for over thirty years having produced Art in the Park, Intergeneration: Building Queer Community Across the Ages Through the Arts and served as Director of the San Francisco Arts Commission Arts Festival.
Since 1999, I have worked in the vibrant environs of new media as a professor in the Web Design New Media School at the Academy of Art University where I enjoy teaching various new media project concept development both online and on-campus courses at the graduate and
undergraduate levels.
In addition to painting, the locus of my work resides at the confluence of fine art practices and space flight technology as I have intentionally influenced the expansion of the Arts, Humanities and Culture in Space Exploration. I serve as Co-Founder and Project Director of the Zero Gravity Arts Consortium (ZGAC), an international arts organization advocating for greater access, for artists, to space flight technology.
As a part of ZGAC’s Artist Into Space Program I intend to fly into suborbital flight as an astronaut along with other collaborating artists. In support of this program, I published a paper in Beijing, China during the 64th International Congress’s Session, Space as an Artistic Medium. Titled, Space Wishes: A New Media Interdisciplinary Performance Collaboration To Be Created
During A Sub-Orbital Flight.   This work was Co-Authored by a number of experts in the field.
I also enjoyed being Chair for the Space Arts Track for the 30th International Space Development Conference of the International Space Society and the Planetary Society. I served as Co-Chair for the 4th International Space Arts Workshop produced in collaboration with Taksha University that was held at Singularity University at NASA Research Park in Mountain View, California.
I serve as a member of the International Astronautically Federation’s Technical Activities Committee for the Cultural Utilization of Space and was an Associate Fellow for ten years at the STUDIO For Creative Inquiry, College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University.
I received a Bachelor of Fine Arts, in Interdisciplinary Arts, from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996 where this emphasis of study was in their Center For Digital Media.

See PBS video http://ww2.kqed.org/spark/workshop-on-space-artists/

 

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